(Ok it’s shamefully easy to blog about TED presentations (again and again and again), but hey this is, again, awesome stuff).
Sir Ken Robinson explains how public education system all around the world educates people out of creativity. British wit and creativity insight at its best.
Creativity Vs Literacy :
Creativity is as important in education as literacy and we should treat it with the same status.
Stigmatising being wrong :
What we do know : being wrong is not being creative. But if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with something original. (…) By the time they become adults, most kids have lost this capacity. We’re stigmatising mistakes. In our public education system, mistakes are the worst thing you can do. The result is : we are educating people out of their capacity of being creative. Picasso once said that : all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. The reason is : around the world there was no public education system before the XiXth century. They all came to meet the needs of industralism. Hence the hierarchy in the public school disciplines.
The end of degrees :
The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. According to UNESCO, in the next 30 years, more people worldwide will be graduating from education system then since the beginning of history. As a result, suddlenly degrees aren’t worth anything. There’s a process of academic inflation indicating tat the whole process of eductaion is shifting beneath our feets. So we think to radically review our view of intelligence.
3 things about intelligence.
1 – It’s diverse : we think about the world in all the ways we are experiencing it : visually, in sound, aesthetically, in abstract terms, in movement
2 – Intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interaction of human brains, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. In fact, creativy which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value,
more often than not comes about through the interactions of different disciplinary ways of seing things.
3 – It’s distinct, there are different types of intelligence. Gillian Lynne (choregrapher of Cats and Phantom of the Opera) was brought to the doctor by her parents because she could not stand still, her parents thought she had trouble to focus. The doctor put the radio on and ask Gillian to stay in the room while he was going out with her parents. He said : she does not have trouble focussing, she’s a dancer. I love this story. Most kids don’t have this chance, some of them are diagnosed with hyperactive disorder.
#hypertextual 